The Prime Minister, Theresa May, has twice praised the University of Birmingham in recent months for what we have done in setting up our own fully comprehensive secondary school – the first of its kind in England. In fact, the Prime Minister has gone further, saying she wants to see other universities setting up schools or sponsoring existing underperforming ones.

In the UK, 75% of families own a car, and as a population we travel over 244 billion miles a year in cars. In the near future, how we drive those miles will change dramatically. Increasingly, autonomous systems technology will control our vehicles, with intelligent automation making driving safer, more efficient and more predictable.

A child washed up on the shores of Turkey after drowning at sea; the images of youngsters climbing across fences of barbed wires on Lampedusa; a boy sitting dazed and bloodied in the back of an ambulance after surviving an airstrike in Syria – these are some of the images that, once seen, can never be unseen. The moments, captured in these images pass, but the cycles of displacement continue.

Many readers may remember the 1980's advertising slogan for British Rail, that claimed "We're getting there"; I fear we may still be on our way. At that time the railways were still experiencing significant competition from the allure of the private car, and the railway system had undergone several decades of disinvestment that led to poor performance and the eventual breakup and privatisation of the network.